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Half-way to Breaking Even: Missile Cards iOS Sales to Date

Morning all. Stopping by for a brief info-drop update for those of you who still want a peek behind the curtain of my latest game’s launch sales on iOS.

Deets after the jump:

Missile Cards launched on iOS, officially, on Wednesday, June 28th. In just under two weeks, I’m now a little past the half-way point on my Quest To Break Even on the game’s six month development cycle. You can read more about the ups and downs of that journey by sifting through recent/past blog posts on the site here.

The TL:DR version: Missile cards has done decently, so far, and has received a lot of positive praise from press and players. However, it hasn’t paid for itself or for future development. At least not yet.

THE NUMBERS

As of right now, I’ve sold about 4,370 copies on iOS.

I need to hit 8,000 sales before the game pays for its own development. Beyond that? I get a little pocket change to try to pay more bills down with.

The vast majority of those sales happened within the first 4-5 days of launch, and sales momentum has slowed dramatically now that the game isn’t being featured (though it has moved to some sub-pages in a few sections, which is nice).

This slowdown is pretty typical, so my rate of progress towards the Quest to Break Even is a long game from here on out. Slow and hopefully somewhat steady. Maybe I’ll get there sooner than later. I don’t know. Looking at the beginning of the long tail in the chart above, I’d be happy if sales continue to hover between 150 and 200 copies a day. Realistically, they’ll prob drop further.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the launch has gone, and I’m already well into development of my next mobile card game project. But I’ve also got some personal/life stuff to sort out in the weeks and months to come, so that’s weighing heavily on me right now.

ANDROID VERSION? WHAT’S NEXT?

I’m getting a LOT of requests for an Android version AND for add-on content to the core game. These are both things I’d very much like to do, though they’re each going to take a solid chunk of time and energy to put together.

Android is a tricky platform, as it has its own market quirks, and a bunch of additional resolutions to try to account for code-wise. The way Missile Cards was designed isn’t well suited to anything outside of the widescreen 1920×1080 format or the adjusted iPad resolution. I’d hate to throw it out there and find that pixels get crunched and wrecked on a third of the devices…so I have some investigation to do.

Content-wise, I’m not currently planning on creating tons of new stuff for Missile Cards. That might change, but I’m pretty happy with the game as-is, scope-wise. HOWEVER: I’ve always envisioned having some kind of score attack/infinite mode. That’d take a significant amount of time to build out the way I’d like to tackle it, but it’s something I’m seriously considering for a future update–once I’ve got time and resources to devote to it again.

The big problem right now is that I’m struggling. In a lot of areas — professionally, personally, mentally, and financially. Right now, I’m planning to scale back in a lot of areas while doubling down on finding time for some much-needed self-care, getting steady freelance income flowing again, and re-calibrating other chunks of my world that are in chaos.

I need balance, desperately.

At the moment, I’m sort of in “Life Triage” mode, so it might be some time before I can get everything sorted and make progress towards expanding Missile Cards to new platforms and weaving in additional content.

Hey! Just dropping in to say that I’ve been listening to your Youtube gamedev podcasts and I’ve been enjoying them a lot! I’m surprised they aren’t more popular, honestly. I guess there’s so much content out there that it’s easy to get missed.

Did you break even with your game? I hope so!

I’ll be following your blog from now on. Thanks for sharing your experiences and best of luck with your games and your writing.